When I arrived at the home for inspection, the owner told me that they were having a "turrible" bug problem they was not able to get a handle on. They have sprayed, left traps, and still! I acknowledged and started doing my thing. Well... it didn't take me too long to see where the problem could be coming from. Soon as I walked into the Family Room and looked to the rear of the room there it was looking right back at me! Under the sliding glass doors I could see a bunch of little holes under the door. Under further examination I saw that somebody had drilled holes in the sliding glass door channels. The sill is constructed of aluminum and has ridges in it that the small rollers on the bottoms of the glass doors roll on so you can slide the door open easily.

The rollers on the outside edge have little slots in them for water to drain out so it's not trapped in the channel. Evidently, someone got the bright idea to drill holes in the ridges along the channel to let the water out! The problem with that is they drilled all the way through both of them, exposing the interior to the elements outside!

These tracks are made of aluminum. They should be kept clean of dirt and dust. The small rollers on the bottom of the sliding doors are very small, if there is dirt and stuff in the tracks it will wear out the rollers, the tracks themselves can become worn & lumpy, making the sliders hard to open and close. In this houses case, what they need to do is remove the doors and replace the track. If it was just a hard opening door, and not drilled, they make little kits to repair both the rollers and the tracks in the sill. They are small caps that snap over the damaged ones giving the rollers a new surface to roll on. An overhang above the doors would help too, keeping the water from getting in the tracks to begin with. They are lucky it didn't cause any water damage.

Sometimes the obvious things go unnoticed. Hard to believe the bug guy missed that! The Home Inspector didn't...

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